They’re not waiting for the next flood to find out which culverts will fail. Across Vermont, volunteers have been crawling inside the concrete and metal tubes that run beneath roads and driveways, cataloguing what’s cracked, clogged, or undersized before the next major storm arrives to make that determination for them.
VTDigger reported the effort Saturday, June 7 — and the work isn’t glamorous. Volunteers squeeze into drainage culverts, often through standing water or mud, looking for structural damage, debris buildup, and pipes too narrow to handle the kind of rainfall Vermont has seen with increasing frequency since Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and the catastrophic July 2023 floods.
The culvert problem
Culverts are easy to ignore until they’re not. When one blows out during a flood, it can take a road with it — cutting off a neighborhood, a farm, or an emergency route for days. Vermont’s rural road network depends heavily on these structures, many of them aging and sized for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect what the state actually gets.
The volunteer surveys are designed to build a ground-level inventory of which culverts are at highest risk, giving towns something to act on before a storm rather than after. That kind of pre-disaster data can also help municipalities make the case for state or federal funding to replace undersized pipes.
It’s slow, dirty work. Each culvert has to be physically inspected — measurements taken, conditions noted, location recorded. No shortcut exists; you either go in or you don’t know.
Vermont has faced back-to-back years of flood damage severe enough to wipe out sections of state highway, collapse bridges, and strand entire communities. The 2023 floods alone caused damage that state officials estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Towns that had done pre-flood infrastructure surveys reported being better positioned to document losses and access recovery programs quickly.
VTDigger didn’t report which specific towns or organizations are currently running culvert surveys, how many volunteers are involved, or whether the effort is coordinated statewide through the Agency of Natural Resources or another body. Those details weren’t immediately available.
Reporting by VTDigger, published June 7, 2026. Read the original report.
